Mounting Linux Partitions in Ubuntu

If you plug in an external hard drive with a Linux filesystem, it will automount and show up on your desktop, just like any external media. But what if you have an internalhard drive or partition with a Linux filesystem? Well, that’s what this tutorial is about.

Warning: The tutorial on this page is for an internal drive that will serve as an extra data partition. If you would like to mount a separate drive or partition as /home instead, you want a different tutorial.

First you have to determine what the partition is called and what filesystem it is. One quick way to do it if you know what filesystem you formatted the drive as (Ext3, for example) is to just type the terminal command

As you can see, I’m able to locate that /dev/sda2 is my Linux partition, but in System, I don’t find out if it’s Ext3, Ext4, Reiserfs, or what it is. If I happen to know it’s Ext4, cool.

But let’s say I didn’t know. Well, one way to find out for sure is to install GParted and find out:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gparted gksu
gksudo gparted

You can go to System > Administration > GParted and enter your password to get it started.

Ah, now I can definitely see it’s Ext4 for sure. Under Partition I see it’s /dev/sda2, and under Filesystem, I see it’s Ext4.

If you have a second physical hard drive (not just another partition), you might have to click on the top-right corner to focus on the second hard drive. (Click on the down-pointing arrow to get the drop-down menu.)

Since we’ve made changes to the /etc/fstab file, we need to have Ubuntu acknowledge those changes:

sudo mount -a

Now I need to give it the proper permissions. Let’s just assume, for this example, that my username is jessica.

sudo chown -R jessica:jessica /storage
sudo chmod -R 755 /storage

Now the partition is mounted in the /storage folder and is ready for use!

*** Yes, I could just use the name of it (/dev/sda2), but UUID is more precise. It’s unlikely that I’ll unplug my internal drive, plug in a new internal drive, and then plug back in my original internal drive so that the partition names are reassigned. Still, it’s safer to use the exact partition identifier in /etc/fstab.